Ubuntu – How to force Wine into acting like 32-bit Windows on 64-bit Ubuntu

64-bitwine

When installing Wine on 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04, both 64-bit support and 32-bit support get installed. If I run wine foo.exe where foo.exe is a 64-bit-aware installer, it thinks it's on 64-bit Windows. This would be fine if this mode didn't fail, but in my case, it does (yet the Wine database suggests the app I'm trying to install should work, presumably as a 32-bit app).

How do I tell Wine (and Winetricks) to use Wine in 32-bit-only mode?

Best Answer

It turns out that to make Wine run in 32-bit-only mode, one needs to:

  1. Remove ~/.wine if it was already created in the 64-bit mode. (WARNING: This removes all stuff you have installed under Wine. Move it aside instead if you want to avoid dataloss.)

  2. Set the WINEARCH environment variable to win32 i.e. export WINEARCH=win32

  3. Then run wine (or winetricks, etc.)

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